Things to do in London this weekend (September 5-6)

No London summer is complete without the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival – aka GDIF – which, as ever, brings a spectacular array of gargantuan street theatre shows and spectacular installations to the streets of Greenwich and the Docklands for a couple of weeks in late summer. The 2026 theme of ‘We Move’ carries on this week with the return of the Dancing City sub-festival (Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Sep 5), and it’ll wrap up with (In)visible Dancing (General Gordon Square, Woolwich, Sep 6) and an exhilarating 90-minute flash mob in the heart of Woolwich.

Spring has quietly, gracefully, been one of London’s best restaurants since Skye Gyngell decided to spruce up these former Inland Revenue offices in 2014. An Aussie earth mother who knew her way around a greengrocer, Gyngell made her name as head chef at Petersham Nurseries Café, delivering seasonal fare so fantastically finessed that the blousy Richmond teahouse scored a Michelin star under her guidance. Before she died in 2025, Gynell spawned a legion of devoted imitators. Food here is hearty by stealth; an elegant crab bruschetta is weighty with white meat, a creamy risotto of fleshy, copper-coloured girolles is solidly sensual. Dishes are slightly Italian, except for when they’re not. Not only is it sensational tasting, it’s also extremely good-looking. Skye Gyngell’s ethos was not only about the freshest of produce, but the prettiest of plates.

Small and independent nurseries from across the south east will gather in the Horniman Museum’s huge gardens to sell all manner of flora. Go on down to the Forest Hill museum from 11am to get your hands on succulents, shrubs, alpines and more from specialists like Miles Japanese Maples, Spring Platt Snowdrops, ZC Succulents and Ottershaw Cacti. It’s also a great opportunity to get expert advice on how to avoid killing off your pet plant within days of bringing it home. 

As You Like It is mostly a play about a large assortment of oddballs living in a forest for some reason. It definitely has a plot, but it also kind of plays out like an eccentric Tudor sketch show. While many productions get lost in the woods, dual directors Sean Holmes and Charlie Josephine – plus their creative team headed by designer Paul Wills – are excellent guides through the trees. This is not a production that comes with a high concept, but by making every character as vivid as possible, visually and personality-wise, it’s just a great, boisterous production where you don’t find yourself questioning ‘and who is THAT guy?’ two hours in. From Lola Shalam’s highly strung romantic lead Rosalind and Grace Oddie-James as her amusingly laidback posh girl BFF Celia to co-director Josephine’s own turn as insecure wannabe geezer Orlando, all the way to Jonathan Broadbent’s scene-stealing Touchstone, it is simply very fun to spend some time in Wills’ whiteboard forest with these people. 

Six years after our own very real pandemic, Hollywood’s first Covid-inspired blockbuster manifests what many of us fantasised about during the darkest moments of the first lockdown – a broken world emptied of human life. Influenza is to blame in Ridley Scott’s film, which technically makes it an a-cough-alypse, and while there are bursts of Mad Max berserking, The Dog Stars is a surprisingly sensitive meditation on what we could have lost. Interspersed with sweeping IMAX-ready shots of Hig’s plane puttering through the canyons, for long, unthreatening stretches, the drama is so leisurely it’s borderline Gone Fishin’ – a post-apocalyptic hangout movie where its characters stare at the stars, the plaintive score strums with acoustic guitar and they contemplate past lives lost. This isn’t a negative – in fact, it’s what makes The Dog Stars distinctive. 

Every year, London’s famous river gets a whole festival of art installations, performances, and talks devoted to her watery charms, many of which are free to check out. This year’s Totally Thames Festival has scores of events throughout September, all dotted along riverside locations from Richmond to Barking & Dagenham. This week look out for The Waterfront Journals, (Sep 6), a promenade performance of New York City artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s monologues, a river exploration session as part of Mudlarking Weekend (Sep 5-6), or take part in paddlesports sessions and a fishing competition as part of Tidefest (Sep 6) and embark on a plethora of boat tours, guided walks and other participatory events. 

Your rare chance to visit the historic catacombs at this 178-year-old cemetery, with guided tours available for £10 a pop. Visitors will also be able to browse craft stalls, listen to storytelling and beat poetry performances, as well as admiring the birds of prey and Brompton bees. It'll keep you perky despite the macabre setting.

In playwright Simon Stephens’ four-hander (that for the most part is actually a two-hander), Ashton (Ross Gaynor) and Reece (Ian Toner) have become unlikely bedfellows stuck in a bunker together while an apocalypse rages outside. Three years in, they know everything they could possibly know about each other, and maintain what little sense of hope they can by roleplaying key ‘moments’ from each other’s life – selecting treasured memories as you might a show on Netflix. The conversation teeters on the philosophical in places, but for the most part it’s a frank and relatable look at what really matters if you were to strip everything else away. For Ashton, it’s memories of a crush, a promotion, his mother; for Reece, it’s his son.

It’s all about that brass at this festival celebrating one of the most bombastic sections of the orchestra. From marching bands and Balkan beats to jazz, funk, Afrobeat and everything in between, Brassworks is a celebration of brass music at a venue which has the instruments in it’s DNA: Woolwich was home to the legendary Arsenal artillery bands and now to the National Youth Jazz Orchestra (NYJO). Expect live performances throughout the day and workshops, all of which will change your perception of what brass music can be. This year, look out for the London-based Afro-fusion collective Kongo Dia Ntotila, Balkan brass group Balkanatics, and a performance by the National Youth Jazz Orchestra paying homage to Miles Davis, DJ BobaFatt, as well as a community kazoo parade. 

If you’re a carnivore with a big appetite for BBQ, Meatopia has your name written all over it. The boozy food fest is a veritable utopia for meat lovers, with 50 chefs invited down over four days to cook up a storm over a live fire. This year's highlights include Jess Murphy from Ireland’s only Michelin Green Star restaurant Kai, Geravich Mesaengnilverakul from Bangkok’s Choen, plus legends of the UK barbecue scene, Melissa Thompson and Hon’s BBQ. 

After a successful first edition last autumn new festival Jazz on Wick is back for round two this September. Created by the minds behind award-winning small festival Brainchild, Hackney Wick nightclub Colour Factory, nu-jazz collective Orii Community and Voices Radio, it’s doing a full-venue takeover of Hackney Bridge for a day-to-night celebration of jazz and adjacent astral sounds, featuring 9 stages and more than 50 artists. Highlights include a headline set from east London grime MC D Double E, who joins forces with electronic jazz band Zeñel for a jazz-meets-grime mashup set, a Fela Kuti tribute set from Natural Jazz, a set from. emerging neo-R&B artist Shae Univers, and a 30th anniversary celebration for the excellent British indie label Barely Breaking Even. 

This community festival is back, taking over unusual local indoor and outdoor venues across south east London to screen feature films for kids and adults, artists' film and video and archive footage. This year’s highlights include a screening and film quiz at The Man of Kent (Sep 8), a spooky screening of The Blair Witch Project in Nunhead Cemetery (Sep 5), a short film night at Peckham Plex (Sep 5), and a finale screening of standout 2025 film Sinners at LEX2 Livesey Exchange (Sep 13). Look out also for showings of Blue Velvet, Paddington 2, Moonlight, Human Traffic, Burning an Illusion, and Labyrinth at weird and wonderful venues. 

Acclaimed Mexican-American stand-up Ricote settles in at the Park Theatre’s studio for a few weeks of shows. Inkling transfers straight down from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where the hard of hearing comic’s ‘stupidest and smartest show yet’ has received great reviews.

It hasn’t always been clear why Matthew Warchus decided to reconfigure the Old Vic to an in-the-round set-up. But it does all pay off with this fine revival of an early Alan Ayckbourn classic. 1969’s How the Other Half Loves is explicitly written to be performed in-the-round with a single central set standing in for the homes of couples Frank and Fiona Foster and also Teresa and Bob Phillips. Moreover, time is telescoped and chopped up, so that two very different dinner parties that happen on consecutive nights at the two different homes are spliced together into one amusingly unpredictable whole. It’s a funny, zingy, intricately wrought and strangely wholesome play and it’s the brilliant comic performances that make this thing tick. Roger Allam is superb as Frank, and Dorothy Atkinson plays an increasingly panicked Fiona. How the Other Half Loves still sings, a clever, strangely sweet infidelity farce that’s of the ‘60s, but remains timelessly funny.

Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying uses a blend of installation, video, photography, and sculpture to explore our complicated relationship with technology and how modern-day tech systems are reshaping the ways we live our lives – all with a humorous and surreal edge. See four of the artist’s imaginative, idiosyncratic and quietly provocative works at this free Haywood Gallery exhibition. A Life of Navigation includes Chihying’s early works commenting on our hectic urban lives, as well as two newly produced video installations commenting on artificial intelligence and gaming culture. 

If he hadn’t been France’s defining 20th-century statesman, Charles de Gaulle might have made a great comedy straight man. Played by a poker-faced Simon Abkarian in the first instalment of this two-part, bilingual French epic, he carries the air of a man who knows that, yes, that ladder is about to crash to the ground and someone is getting covered in paint. Adapted from Julian T Jackson’s 900-page 2018 biography ‘A Certain Idea of France’, De Gaulle: Résistance is about how the French President-to-be worked himself up through the cracks of history. He’s a captivating and paradoxical figure: a home-front soldier and an unelected democrat who conjures an unofficial mandate for himself through bulldozing force of will and an unwavering belief in himself and his country. HIn UK and Ireland cinemas Aug 28. 

Three feature films deep and it’s safe to say that Jane Schoenbrun has created a brand new subgenre of cinema. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is both a continuation of the preoccupations of their first two features and a leap into more vulnerable territory, accompanied by a dazzling step up in the sophistication of the world-within-a-world building. Schoenbrun has form in creating additional media to sit within their films as a source of nurture for protagonists wrestling with secret shames and desires. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a meta horror-comedy and a whip-smart entertainment industry satire.

Get sun and sand without the faff of a two-hour journey on a baking hot train this summer by heading to Walthamstow’s Big Penny Social, where the courtyard of the UK’s largest beer hall has been transformed into the Big Penny Beach Club for the warmer months. Formerly known as Walthamstow-On-Sea, the seasonal pop-up has had a bit of a glow-up for 2026, with soft golden sands, beach bars and bookable cabanas giving more Balearic than Blackhorse Road, just with more graphic design dads and fewer Wayne Lineker wannabes.

Get down this Friday to kick off the Bank Holiday with an Aperol-themed party, where the first 200 guests to arrive can claim a spritz on the house. And then Soak up some rays on a deck chair, sip draught beers and frozen cocktails served up by the beach bar, and treat yourself to some fish and chips or a scoop or two of Hackney Gelato. Ibiza’s got nothing on E17!

The Royal Academy’s Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, is the first major exhibition devoted to the often overlooked Victorian artist in more than 50 years. Dadd spent nearly a decade completing works like ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ while confined to Bethlem Hospital—better known as Bedlam—after killing his father in a severe psychotic episode. In 1864, he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1886. The exhibition, however, doesn’t begin there. Instead, it returns to Dadd’s days as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, just across from where this exhibition hangs today. While there, he became a founding member of one of Britain’s OG artistic cliques and developed his lifelong fascination with fairies, creating magical, delicate, yet dark works crammed with naughty faces and gossamer dresses. Together, these works remind us that, although Dadd’s body was confined, his imagination never was.

It’s not hard to see why American musical theatre powerhouse Ben Platt was attracted to the British debut of Mark Sonnenblick’s 2018 off-Broadway show. A two-hander, it’s a great vehicle for his talents as a singer and actor. But there’s more to this funny, sad and wistful piece – directed here by David Cromer. It’s New York, 1965, and Platt is Trevor, the singing half of a performing and romantic duo, alongside songwriter Arthur (Gregor Milne). It’s an era when being gay is a threat to life and livelihood. We are Trevor’s audience in smoky Greenwich Village club the Never Get as he tells – and sings – the story of their turbulent relationship and contrasting careers. He’s simultaneously charismatic and achingly vulnerable, sending a gorgeous shiver through every song or landing a wisecrack with a practised twinkle.

Another year, another spectacular line-up of classical music. This year, the orchestral extravaganza will feature 86 concerts across eight weeks, with over 3,000 artists taking to the stage, with the majority of the action taking place inside the grand surroundings of London’s Royal Albert Hall. There'll be the chance to hear visiting ensembles from all over the world, including The Met Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Mahler Academy Orchestra and the Spanish National Orchestra, as well as innumerable concerts and recitals from the classic music world's biggest stars. This week, look out for a Late Night Prom from The Gesualdo Six and the Colin Currie Group, Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia and Symphony No. 9 played by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, and John Wilson conducting a Sinfonia of London Strings. 

Dulwich Picture Gallery's big summer exhibition will be an intriguing contrast with the pastoral landscapes found in its permanent collection. Portrait of a City is all about American urban life, as documented by photographers between 1907 and 2012. It'll offer a fascinating insight into how big cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco grew from low-rise communities into towering assemblages of skyscrapers and multi-lane traffic. Photos from big names including Diane Arbus, Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange will chart the faces and sights of cities in flux.

If you thought walking up to your favourite painting in the National Gallery was as close as you could get to a masterpiece, think again. At Frameless, 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists are presented in ways never seen before, reimagined through cutting-edge technology, animation and soundscapes. Situated in Marble Arch, Frameless plays host to four unique galleries with hypnotic visuals and a dazzling score, where visitiors can enjoy 90 minutes of surreal artwork from Bosch, Dalí and more, for just £23.60.

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